SOURCE: “Crèvecoeur's Letters and Enlightenment Doctrine,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall, 1978, pp. 193-212.

In the following essay, Rucker analyzes Letters from an American Farmer as a dialectic between the rational and pessimistic Crèvecoeur and his emotional and optimistic narrative persona, Farmer James.

The laudation of British North America offered in the first eight sketches of Letters from an American Farmer is predicated upon several Enlightenment concepts: the ideal value of an agrarian democracy located midway between unhandseled nature and civilization; the validity of an economic system based on the pursuit of self-interest; the responsibility of government to ensure the general welfare; the deterministic force of physical and social environments; and the order, intelligibility, and benevolence of the universe. Providing the benefits to be derived from these social and philosophical precepts, the British colonies, the sketches suggest, are the single country to realize the philosophes...